The present invention relates to a vehicle driving assistance apparatus which executes a vehicle control by recognizing a traffic lane on which a vehicle is traveling in real time.
As this kind of technique, a driving assistance system which executes a vehicle control such as a lane keep control has been known. In the driving assistance system, an image of a road on which the vehicle is travelling is captured by a camera etc. and a white line on the road, which defines the traffic lane, is recognized in real time through an image recognition processing, then the vehicle control such as the lane keep control is executed.
In a high traffic place such as a freeway, there is a case where part of the white line on the road is not clear due to smudge or dirt. In this case, the recognition of the white line on the road, defining the traffic lane on which the vehicle is travelling, becomes impossible.
For this problem, Japanese Patent Provisional Publication No. 2007-008281 (hereinafter is referred to as “JP2007-008281”) discloses a system in which, when the system cannot recognize the white line defining the traffic lane, tracks and expected tracks of a forward-travelling vehicle are computed, and an imaginary white line of the traffic lane is traced on the basis of these forward-travelling vehicle's tracks and expected tracks, then the traffic lane is estimated by this tracing and this estimated traffic lane is set as a target lane.